The Jig Is Up

Sharing Saturday  

I have a dog eared "Baby Blues" comic strip pasted to my refrigerator that has been offending my kids as long as they have been able to read. In the first panel, the mother is dancing giddily around the room. In the second panel, she continues to dance, looking beatifically at the ceiling and completely ignoring her children.

In the third panel, the older daughter says, flatly, "I hate Mom's annual back-to-school dance."

The son replies: "I hope she pulls a muscle."

As we rounded the corner to the start of school this week after 10 weeks of summer vacation (but who's counting), the last three of those weeks on vacation and then me at home with the kids trying to work, I started my own jig around the room. 

My kids started mumbling about how they hoped I pull a muscle.

As my children get older and it becomes a tad easier to accomplish things while they're around, the late-summer sense of disorder and lack of structure that hums as loudly as the cicadas abates a bit. However, when I say "accomplish things," I mean things like laundry and grocery shopping, not meaningful work or writing. Those things have to wait for the school bus to lumber up the block.

When my youngest child hit kindergarten, my husband and I decided that, with all three kids in school, my part-time consulting schedule allowed us to abandon the child care we had employed for the previous 11 years. No more nanny. On many levels, I was relieved. The work-at-home mother/child care provider relationship is a tricky one to navigate, and I was tired of wondering whether the women I employed were themselves wondering whether I was truly working. I was tired of the arrangements, explaining the ever-changing schedules, and paying out half of my own take-home salary each week. I eagerly awaited being complete master of my house again. And I was looking forward to spending time at the end of the day with my kids, managing their homework and after-school activity schedules.

We were partially right. With all three kids in school, I have approximately six works hours per day. This works fine, except when someone's sick, or there's a field trip, or a school event that requires a parent, or I have an unavoidable early morning/late afternoon meeting, or there's an orthodontist appointment, or there's a snow day (or a snow week) Or. Or. Or.

And then there's summer vacation. Ten glorious weeks of trying to figure out where my kids will be each week (because there's no longer one summer camp that runs for the entire summer,) what will entertain them when there's no camp or vacation, and how to juggle my consulting work while the hive is swarming around me, hovering closely and needing frequent water breaks and mom time.

I have never had the kind of equanimity one needs to be able to work easily when my kids are around. Even if they are all otherwise occupied and I have a block of time stretching before me, I can't seem to sit down and concentrate. If the kids are nearby, I am on high alert, as if any moment I will need to drop all and rush in.

Of course, this radar was set on high from the moment my oldest son was born. Now that they are 9, 11 and 15, it's really not necessary to be so ready to intervene, but my body has so far been unable to reset the dial.  While I am, generally speaking, a laid back parent, I still can't allow myself to be subsumed in some other activity that requires mental acuity (like reading) when my children are near.

For me, the balance between being a good mom to my kids, and maintaining my own personal life, which includes my work (which satisfies me,) my writing (which feeds me) and being a wife, daughter, sister, and friend and simply a citizen of the world who reads the paper occasionally, is a critical scale on which to center my existence. All of this gets thrown off balance in the summer, and my focus is necessarily more child-centric for those weeks. 

Ten weeks is a long time to put things on hold. And it's not just me getting itchy to have my days back. Much as we all enjoy the summer off from the hecticness of our school-day lives, my kids become a little rudderless as well, eager to get back to their friends and their routines. (in fact, my daughter told me that she was "friendsick" this summer when all her buds were away.) 

Believe me, there is no doubt that my children are my breath.

But my husband is my soul. My family is my memory. My friends are my muscle. My work is my sinew. And my writing is my blood.

All of these things comprise me. The me who exists at this moment in time, in this place, making this mark on the world. The me who is a mother who loves her kids beyond reason, but who also loves all the other facets of her life.

So when I start dancing the bus stop jig after a long summer of taking care of others and having to suppress some of that which makes me me, that little dance is only me pulling all the pieces back together.

 Photo by Kamoteus via Flickr

Comments

[Katherine]

What an eloquent way to explain the back to school jig. I have yet to experience a difference between work-life balance in the summer and the school year. In fact, with my 6-year old in summer camp at her sister's daycare center, the summer schedule was actually easier than the school-year one. (No school closure days, and the center was open 7 am to 6 pm!) Talk to me in another few years...

[Beth Sperber Richie]

Thank you for relieving my guilt at my own back-to-school jig, Karen!

[Jennifer]

I haven't yet experienced the school year; my children are 20 months and 3 1/2 and go to daycare 5 days/week. I do constantly grapple with the guilt and balance of wanting more of them and having too much of them and not enough of me. My absolutely favorite part of your writing is the description of being on high alert when the kids are near. I haven't heard it expressed that way, but it is exactly how I feel! Even when I can do something I feel like there is a time bomb ticking in the corner. My hope is that it will lessen as the years progress, but it looks like it may take a while!